The practice of collection, aggregation, and distribution of market data that relates to point-or time-of-sale transaction data for financial and physical commodity products is well established. Financial market data is the basis for a multi-billion dollar industry upon which the financial markets depend, and commodity market data is similarly relied upon by traders. Such at-sale market data is relatively simple in content, but takes on richness in its collection, aggregation, distribution and analysis, and supports a rich industry ecology. Practices that roughly correspond, but relating to post-sale market data that are applicable to differentiated non-commodity products and services as described herein are almost totally lacking.
A major reason for this is that commodity products (physical and financial) are standardized with specified characteristics and grades that are reliably realized, so that there is little or nothing to be learned about an item post-sale, and a combination of pre-sale descriptors and at-sale data (such as bid/asked/sale price and volume) are sufficient to fully inform buyers. Markets for non-commodity products (and services) have not developed in the same way because of the products' non-standard, differentiated, nature, including the diversity of origin and nature, and the resulting diversity of post-sale experience to be expected. Marketers seize on this to emphasize product differentiations which may be real or just claimed without foundation, so that price alone is of limited significance. The improved communications capabilities of the Internet and related information technologies may enable dramatic enhancements in the market processes for products of all kinds, and particularly may enable for non-commodity markets for differentiated products the development of some of the features of commodity markets, such as price-comparison tools and auctions. Some aspects of this potential have been recognized, particularly with regard to pre-sale and at-sale transaction activities, but the potential to apply such communications to enable new methods for widespread collection and use of new kinds of post-sale market data to support new methods to better inform market actions remains almost completely unrecognized and undeveloped.
Since its inception in the early 1990's, the Internet and the Web have become an increasingly popular source for both information and shopping. In this regard, consumers (also referred to herein as “buyers” or “users”) typically use the Internet to (1) locate vendors for desired items, (2) view information on items prior to purchase and (3) complete a purchase of desired items online. Searches for such items can be completed in various manners, such as by general web searches, reviewing particular vendor sites or virtual shopping malls, use of software shopping agents or “bots,” and the like. This applies to both individual consumers, and business-to-business consumers.
Consumers, however, have limited resources by which to evaluate the usefulness or utility of an item, such as a product or service, as determined by prior purchasers. Such information will be referred to herein as “post-sale market data” or “market data.” Examples of such post-sale market data include a continuous or periodic evaluation by consumers of the utility of an item over a period of time or the operational history (i.e. a maintenance history) of an item.
Most often, the information available to consumers online about a particular item is generated by manufacturers or providers. This information usually is indicative only of the configuration and price of the item for sale, including nominal specifications of capabilities and capacities which may or may not be realistic and deliverable in practice. Typically, the information provided by these parties may be silent or severely limited as to the overall realized utility of an item as determined by prior purchasers of the item. Manufacturers have, as is well known in the art, collected operational history data in the form of tracking repairs performed on items that they manufacture. Warranty service on automobiles is one such example. However, no individual or aggregate, post-sale market data has been previously made available from such manufacturers and service providers to consumers for assisting them in making purchasing decisions.
Some limited post-sale market data has been provided by third party ratings services for use by consumers. However, the information generated by these third parties is generally limited to a particular group of items and/or fail to provide continuous or periodic consumer-generated post-sale market data. Traditional examples of such third party evaluation services include: CONSUMER REPORTS, which provides independent evaluations of products and services without consumer input and ZAGATS SURVEY, which produces ratings of restaurants based on customer surveys, but does not seek continuous review of such restaurants by individual consumers.
Other third party ratings services have appeared recently on the Internet. Services such as EPINIONS, PRODUCTOPIA, DEJA, and CONSUMERREVIEWS address particular item information, but there are no provisions or incentives for consumers to provide continuous or periodic post-sale market data on a purchased item. These sources are, furthermore, proprietary in nature, they generally emphasize anecdotal reviews, with only limited use of quantitative ratings, and they rely on users to spontaneously offer ratings at whatever time they choose to visit the service's Web site. That is, there are no provisions to aggregate post-sale market data from multiple sources for a particular item in order to generate useful, consistent, and broadly-based post-sale market data to consumers. As a result, such services are of very limited value.
Other services such as OPEN RATINGS and BIZRATE.COM seek consumer evaluations of the ease of doing business with, and integrity of, the parties offering products or services over the Internet, and obtain ratings of merchants or suppliers or marketplaces as agencies, rather than evaluating the actual items purchased. Such services may be triggered at the point of sale, but do not obtain data on the purchased items. Another service, ALEXA.COM, seeks consumer evaluations of the value of Web sites. All of these sources are again proprietary in nature, and again have no provisions to aggregate post-sale market data from multiple sources for a particular item in order to generate useful and broadly-based post-sale market data to consumers.
As a result, there is a need for a service through which post-sale market data is collected from a broad group of consumers for a wide-variety of products and services who are actively solicited to participate at one or more relevant times in the life-cycle of use, aggregated in a standard format, and provided to consumers in order to assist purchasing decisions, preferably with a range of value-added support services for access and analysis that may be provided in an open market. Such a service is heretofore unknown in existing technologies.